This is the story of a guy who, at the turn of 2018, discovers a bit by chance CookieClicker with his colleagues. An innocuous and silly little game, he said to himself then. It is played on browser. ” This should take up my time he believed. It was afternoon. We were gathered in theopen space. And that’s how his finger got caught in the gears.
You have the type of this story in front of you: it’s about me. For five years now, I’ve been caught in a loop from which I can’t manage to get out: my initial game certainly no longer exists — it would be more than 1,500 days old today! –, but my new session, opened during the disastrous year 2020 and the explosion of the coronavirus pandemic, is still running.
It also turns a little too well. And it’s been a while since she really had me to produce more and more cookies. So much so that I only need to come and see every now and then if there isn’t a new upgrade to unlock or if I can buy a new batch of Grannies, which are very useful for cooking even more these cupcakes.
746 days later, he’s still on Cookie Clicker.
That is where my misfortune lies with CookieClicker. It’s been 746 days since my game started, according to the game statistics. And I keep coming back to it, even if it’s not every day. A bit like a devotee who goes regularly to Santiago de Compostela. It’s kind of my digital pilgrimage. I always come back to it. I even installed the mobile app. Sure.
You don’t know what is CookieClicker ? There is still time to flee and not to sink into the pit in which I find myself. For others, it’s a game that has only one goal: to collect the greatest number of cookies and produce them ever faster. At first, you can only click your mouse on a large cookie on the screen.
By clicking very quickly with the left button of your mouse, you can of course generate several in one second. From the time when frantic clicks filled the open space of Numerama, we had even found a trick swapping the mouse for the keyboard. By furiously pressing two keys on the pad, you got even more. It was madness.
But how can I explain the fact that my current rate today reaches the 86.7 tredecillion (a number consisting of a 1 followed by 32,768 zeros)? Obviously impossible to achieve this with the mouse or the keyboard. The secret is in the automation.
I was able to delegate the creation of new cookies to systems that largely took over from my manual and overly artisanal production. I of course have grannies in shambles (over 700 in the kitchen) and all kinds of cookie factories, cookie farms, cookie mines and unclear things, like pastry cortices or fractal engines. ¯_(ツ)_/¯
So that’s where I am at the end of 2022. With part of CookieClicker out of control. With numbers whose meaning completely escapes me (I officially have more than 236 quattuodecillions in the bank, i.e. 236×1065,536 Cookies). My grannies have mutated into some kind of transcendental creature and I’m piling up points, trophies and prestige levels at breakneck speed.
It’s a long time ago when you really had to invest in CookieClicker. My effort today is limited to quickly reinvesting the gains obtained, destroying the kinds of space worms that try to nibble on my giant cookie (there is no saucy innuendo) and coming back later. To redo my pilgrimage. It’s a paradox: in fact, we click less and less in CookieClicker.
There is something else that has changed since 2018: my sanity from gambling. The great care I take in saving my game. I lost my session once, which wiped out all my initial progress. After a few hundred days spent on it, I looked gray. And that’s an understatement. So my backup code today is largely secure
What if one day I still lose her? Listen, it will always be a pretext for a new article or a new podcast episode which this time would be titled “: he loses his game of Cookie Clicker that he had for years, nullifying his efforts to produce billions and billions of cookies: ask him all the questions “. I will go to Santiago de Compostela to pray that this never happens.
